Archive for the ‘Insider Security’ Category

Many minds seem to be wondering something like this: “is an organization’s data more at risk from an insider (employee, contractor, etc) purposely doing damage or from a well intentioned employee?”

It seems to be a relative certainty that one of the two represents the largest risk to an organization’s data. I read this article about a Deloitte survey. To the point that 91% of those surveyed said they were worried about the risk of employee misconduct related to information technology. I’d call 91% many minds.

When I was at Trend Micro we used to say that there would always be a virus threat as long as there were humans using computers. It has become trite to suggest that virus writers relied on the thoughtless-but-innocent behavior of users.

But is that also true when it comes to damage done by insiders? I would hypothesize that in absolute dollar numbers the highest risk of loss due to insider behavior is probably also from the well-intentioned person trying to do their job. I won’t elaborate here on that topic because Matt Flynn has recently done that very well in a recent discussion with IT Business Edge.

Does the distinction matter? When talking about insider security solutions with IT professionals many times the conversation gravitates to concerns about a few malicious people often concluding that the real need for insider security solutions is confined to a few people who are so malicious that they cannot be effectively stopped.

I suspect that if the real economic damage to organizational data from all sources could be accurately charted we would find the most compelling justification for securing against inadvertent harm from insiders.

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About the Writer

I'm about figuring out what it takes to make cool technology get usefully used on a large scale. Today I'm the president of NetVision where we are doing everything we can to make the use of identity in organizational computing a really transparent - and thus inherently secure - process.